Bitcoin Forum

https://fortune.com/2015/06/25/openbazaar-not-silk-road

Does Brian think, there will be only legal things for sale on OB? Is he getting nervous already?

I think OB will have a bad image in a few years, just like Bitcoin faces now, but someday they will realize that you can't stop decentralization.

This must be completely decenterlized for it to work or Merica will shut it down.

Why even mention Silkroad? This is a shameless press release that mentions Silkroad for no other reason than to gain attention using keywords that have nothing to do with OpenBazaar.

#silkroad
#silkroad
#silkroad

It is a marketplace that will make it easy to sell illegal goods. I don't understand how you think OB is nothing like silkroad? I think it's a fair comparison.

each member of the OpenBazaar is equal .OpenBazaar is open-source software that runs a peer-to-peer network Instead of relying on a single leader like Silk Road's Dread Pirate Roberts

I'm glad to hear it won't be the next Silk Road because it can't have legally transacted BTC stolen by government agents.

I think they're probably the next evolutionary step from Silk Road. Any darknet market will likely have to be decentralised in the future to actually remain operational or to give its users faith that the admins or some other entity isn't going to run off with their money at some point.


Well that's the idea with desentralised markets  :D.

I could name 5 popular black market sites that are alive and well today that deal in illegal products. People that sell Cocaine and Heroin most likely won't appear on a website that is moderated and have strict rules about what vendors are allowed to sell.

OB is going to have moderators and rules? Doesn't sound very decentralised to me if so, but I'm not entirely sure how a fully decentralised or uncensored one would work anyway. If OB doesn't really work for people wanting to buy illicit materials one will come about that will work for those people that's for sure.

Even Silkroad banned the sale of firearms, ammunition and several other questionable items/services.
I remember a murder for hire section...
Publicly known investors won't allow OB to be the next SR. Maybe I'm wrong but I doubt it! 

I hope this site grows and is not shut down, maybe it could be the central market for things some day, like an ebay for cryptos.

As far as I can tell it is not going to function over the Tor network, so how will it "make it easy to sell illegal goods"? Major drug dealers are not going to take a step backwards with thier OpSec.

I think they are going to be the next eBay, with legal items and for normal people

government could target people who run the decentralized software .. just like they target people who download via torrents

If OB gets a bad image as such people will just create a gazillion similar ones, eventually people will wake up and see there is nobody to blame but themselves. 

They could, but it would not be easy. They would have to take them down one at a time since there is no central chokepoint. Due to resource limitations they would likely target only the biggest fish and small time sellers could thrive.

Does OpenBazaar offer some sort of moderation or reporting system for undesirable or illegal products? If so, that might help with some control, although that somewhat goes against the whole ideal of being decentralised.

Then route your traffic through a safe proxy or tor. I think the idea is even if they did start coming after people they can't take the entire network down. One hoster or torrent seeder gets taken out then there's a thousand more they've got to go after.


I'm not sure how it's going to work but surely they wont let users sell child porn and weaponized uranium on there will they?

People will sell illegal products unless there is a mechanism to prevent people selling illegal products. It might put people off if they make it impossible to use the system through Tor, or VPNs, and make all users IP addresses clearly visible. It's unlikely anyone would risk selling anything illegal if they couldn't do it anonymously.

So, how does BitTorrent handle illegal stuff? I don't use it, but I would think they don't have child porn being shared.

Welcome to BitcoinTalk :)

That will be the big question, how they can delete illegal stuff fast.
But i bet they will find a solution, ebay can handle it also.

OpenBazaar have big sponsors, they will employ a lot of new workers that will patrol and search for illegal stuff and delete it.

That is not how a decentralized marketplace is supposed to work. If someone has the authority to delete other's stuff, then it is centralization.

There is simple thing called common sense and moderation. There are mods who check comments and torrents which contains abusive images, child or extremely ugly fetish porn or sick things like that.
We could have similar system integrated in the OpenBazaar. Just let mods do their work.

The mods are on torrent listing sites; they don't actually moderate seeds and peers using the BitTorrent protocol.

I can imagine that's how it might end up working for many. There'll be sanitised portals that become popular. Perhaps vendors there will club together to increase buying power and reduce prices. If you want the grime then you'll be able to sniff around elsewhere.

I would not patronize those portals, just as I don't patronize random Amazon seller portals where they only list their specific items encoded with their Amazon Associates referral URLs. I might patronize the Amazon ones if the sellers were bona fide libertarian/an-cap, but in the case of OpenBazaar, it would be readily apparent when portals are anti-liberty, anti-capitalist, excluding competitors, and even legal goods/services by having too narrow a selection of them.

I assume it'll be integrated into online storefronts as parts of individual websites as much as it becomes a giant marketplace in itself. If someone wants a libertarian Hello Kitty Iphone case no doubt there'll be one somewhere for them.

It's becoming an increasingly intriguing prospect. I'll be very interested to see how the world chooses to make use of it. It might go off in some very unexpected directions.

I really don't see how they can regulate it. From what I read ANYTHING can be sold on there.

i think there are sort of moderator that check the torrent that users upload every day

it would be the same here, the escrow/arbiter will check if what you are selling is illegal or not

but then we can fall in a centralization market, which isn't what open bazar is aiming for

the point is that you can't have 100% regulation and decentralization, hell you can not even have 100% regulation in a centralized system...

They will have to just go after people on individual level like they would with cash deals on the street, its a new challenge for the gov.  Buying small amounts of things like weed are probably going to be easier than ever, not worth police time to police.

if you consider loads and loads of illegal copyrighted material that is being downloaded through torrent, you see that they don't really have any control.
in fact the biggest usage of torrent is to download all these copyrighted files.

yeah but there some heavy illegal stuff that you will not find there like cp, so someone is actually controlling

Anything can be sold, as long as it doesn't clash with the Terms and Conditions. Sellers trying to trade CP.etc will be banned by the admin, and their earnings will be deducted from the wallets. That said, I don't think that OpenBazaar will be online anytime soon. May be they'll start trading in 2017 or 2018. Only by then, these things will become clear.

They should employ some sort of moderation indeed. Else they will be the prime target of many law enforcement agencies..

How about the nxt market? Isn't that even more decentralized as the hosting is on the nxt network?

what OB will not decentralized ??? what is mean of that statement OB will not be next Silk Road than we really need a moderated marketplace where any one can moderate us easily than we already have Ebay a well known marketplace, i think will not get succeed if they wouldn't implement the decentralized marketplace there. 

This is so sad to see that OpenBazaar will have huge failure and concept on what it was getting attention of everyone is finished.I don't think someone will use it if they can not trade anonymously and freely.There are already many popular trading platform which will begin to use Bitcoin and will block easily way of OpenBazaar.OpenBazaar will have success only if it will support anonymous and independent,decentralized system.

Open Bazaar will grow big and strong before the mainstream media realizes that every one can buy anything on OpenBazaar. ;D
As Bitcoin is an incremental, evolutionary, with new technologies .whole business hinges on the idea that bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are going to take off to the point where the average user is comfortable using them. ;D ;)
It should be user friendly or very familiar so  everyone can use it easily. ;D
https://fortune.com/2015/06/25/openbazaar-not-silk-road/

BitBay vs Openbazaar, which will win?

both like ebay and amazon, is good to have competitor, you can maybe something in one that there isn't in another, or a better price for soemthing that isn't in the other market

but i don't like that bitbay, will utilize only bitbay coin for its market

he has every reason to be scared look what happened to silk road owner. since openbazar is a similar project and also it can have the benefit of anonymity of using bitcoin people are going to abuse if for illiegal activities

Isn't it possible for the gov to force the openbazaar devs to shut it down if they wanted to?

If it's decentralized then how can they force them to shut down as there's no central authority to attack? IT would be like going after satoshi to take down bitcoin or trying to take down a torrent client. Besides, many more decentralized markets will pop up sooner rather than later and many will be open source. The best one will prevail.

open bazar isn't like silk road, they cannot do anything, but they may apply some kind of pressure(for example by tracking one of the user that use open bazar and seize his computer) and scare the users base, that is still so tiny, this will force other users to not join the project

really that statement very disappointed it will be no like Silk Road because many users were waiting ti its fully functional and that is most awaited project as so many eyes are on them, if they seize users access to the marketplace than it will become useless for big investors, Ebay and Amazon will remain market leader with these kind of stupidity.

It's obvious there will be some sort of moderation going on, otherwise the host that hosts the actual webpage will be raided in seconds. Total decentralization is not possible if you want to reach mainstream audiences, as some moderation is needed.

OpenBazaar still will be very attractive for different types of customers because of its decentralized system ,who doesn't want to share full details related to them.This will not be like Silk road but still will be usable like that somehow.This is modern concept of online trading platform which should have success in my opinion.Well only time will if it will be like Silk road or not as decentralization and multicoin support is enough to make further ways to fulfill the requirement of different customers.

So many BS replies just to boost post count for ad campaigns...

Are you sure? Bitbay seems to be advertising itself as a Decentralized market https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=850267.0

I wonder if the govt will go after him for releasing this kind of software .. I'm guessing since it's distributed he is bulletproof against prosecution, but I'm sure his phones are already tapped

It's just software. It's the use or abuse of it by others that causes the problem. The creator of Bittorrent is alive and well and not wearing shackles.

He said bitpay not bitbay. I think he got confused. Although this is the first I have heard about bitbay.

as long as it is p2p nobody can have any control over it, AFAIK
the thing you are talking about looks like the control the website owner/moderator of sites like piratebay, kickass have over the content and that is purely on users reports

CP and other illegal goods WILL be sold on OpenBazaar and there will be noone able to completely stop it, unless they change the protocol to decentralization.

There are many, many ways to hide one's IP. Even the illegal files can be altered and encrypted, so that noone will be able to check the files. Illegal services can have different legal names, as long as the end user knows the secret he will have easy access.

Somebody was saying, there is no CP on torrent... this is utter BS.

It has to be centralized to have terms and conditions. I understood that it would not have an admin or centralization.

well in theory the escrow or arbiter can check what good they are selling, if they hold the money, they can ask for it

but then you will get a partial decentralized system or soemthing like that
as long as it is p2p nobody can have any control over it, AFAIK
the thing you are talking about looks like the control the website owner/moderator of sites like piratebay, kickass have over the content and that is purely on users reports

If this is true, then OpenBazaar gives the authoritarian governments around the world (esp. United States, North Korea.etc) the perfect excuse to ban the possession of Bitcoin. And if they make the possession of Bitcoins a punishable offence, we will not get any sort of worldwide adoption, which we are hoping for. Is OpenBazaar worth all that trouble?

Yes, let them ban the entire internet to stop BTC. Oh wait, they can't.

i think he means in the way they did with russia, which isn't a real ban in the end, but more like an intimidating approach, to make people reluctant to use bitcoin

they certainly cannot stop torrent, and they will not stop openbazar

i think he means in the way they did with russia, which isn't a real ban in the end, but more like an intimidating approach, to make people reluctant to use bitcoin

they certainly cannot stop torrent, and they will not stop openbazar

yeah, they can not ban bitcoin, they can only scare businesses to prevent them from accepting bitcoin, but as long as there is places like openbazzar and darknets, and you can stay anonymous and spend/earn your bitcoins there is not really much they can do.

OpenBazaar is in the making since ages. It really would be nice to have a working exchange that is really decentralized. Though its unavoidable that illegal things will be sold.

So really, the only solution would be decentralization. And if they fight the communication then encrypt everything, scramble, port changing and what so ever.